Akopos

“All a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.” Albert Camus, The Plague

Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ and our own Great Reset

Mr. Jones was working as a school janitor when he mailed an unsolicited, fictionalized war story to The New Yorker. In short time he became a literary sensation.

Source: Thom Jones, Janitor Turned Acclaimed Author, Dies at 71 – The New York Times

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I was twenty-three and in my final year at The Evergreen State College when I came across The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones. It was a slim book with an intriguing cover that I bought almost as an afterthought. The short stories it contained were some of the most visceral pieces I had ever read. As the title suggested, each story was like a boxer’s punch– precision fury distilled down to a single, sharp blow. In combination, Jones’s collection had a cumulative effect that left me dazed. Beyond the power of the writing was the realization that Jones was a real flesh-and-blood guy who had worked as a janitor just a few miles from where I was living. Up to then, I’d never really thought of writers as actual people. Jones’s proximity abruptly reduced the distance between myself as a reader and the authors that I admired. Like his writing, his nearness was a revelation.

An article I wrote for LOSTWKND, a new literary magazine you should definitely check out.

LOST WKND Issue N˚ 1

In April, the scientific community was jolted by news that Chinese researchers had successfully edited the DNA of a human embryo. It was a watershed moment: the first time humanity had edited its own germ line, the sex cells (eggs and sperm) used to pass on genes from generation to generation. Although the experiment—conducted by Junjiu Huang and his colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University—used non-viable embryos and produced unintended mutations, the implications are profound. Beyond fears over genetic engineering and “designer babies,” to manipulate the human germ line is to manipulate human heredity; evolution itself becomes malleable.

Source: The Round-Eyed Übermenschen of the Middle Kingdom | LOSTWKND

A feature I wrote for Flaunt Magazine.

Flaunt Magazine | Place: The Road to Extinction Is Paved with Good Intentions.

Issue 139, The Frankenstein Issue

Surprised and very pleased to make this list.

Best Horror, 2013 | Shimmer.

Yesterday, Ellen Datlow posted her long list of Honorable Mentions for her 2013 Best Horror of the Year, and six Shimmer stories are among the mentions:

From Issue #16:

The Revelation of Morgan Stern, by Christie Yant
The Binding of Memories, by Cate Gardner
Word and Flesh, by Dennis Ginoza
The Life and Death of Bob, by William Jablonsky

FELINE MYTHOLOGY, a feature I wrote for Flaunt Magazine.

5,300 years ago in the village of Quanhucun in Shaanxi, China, cats ate millet alongside the farmers who grew it. The story is told in pieces of bone—mandible, pelvis, tibia, humerus—unearthed and carbon dated by Chinese scientists in 2013. Isotopic data reveals a diet rich in grains, indicating the sharing of food between cats and humans. Variations in the amount of millet to meat suggest that some cats were treated better than others. One cat in particular was quite elderly, its teeth worn down to nubs. Researchers speculate that it was a favorite, provided with food and shelter by humans after a long life protecting the harvest from mice.

Flaunt Magazine | The monthly American fashion culture magazine.

The full text of my short story, “The Widower”, is now available online at Per Contra.

Per Contra, Issue 29

Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network — Support the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship.

Want to support more writers like Octavia Butler? Philadelphia Printworks will donate a portion of the proceeds for this shirt to the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia Butler Scholarship for Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop at UCSD.

A terrific blog post by Rashida J. Smith in which she shares memories of working with Octavia E. Butler and talks about the reading last Friday in Seattle to honor Ms. Butler’s legacy .

Reading Report: Honoring the Legacy of Octavia E. Butler | No Inside Voice.

Last night I had the privilege of participating in a reading in honor of the late Octavia E. Butler at Wayward Coffeehouse here in Seattle.

NORTHWEST WRITERS HONOR LEGACY OF OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was put together by the incomparable Caren Gussoff to support the recently released anthology “Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. ” The anthology, in turn, is to suppor the Octavia E Butler Scholarship organized by the Carl Brandon Society. I’ve blogged about Octavia’s importance to Clarion (and science fiction genre) here before, but, in short, the scholarship supports the attendance of one writer who has been accepted into any of the Clarion workshops (West, South, San Diego) and might otherwise not be able to attend.

I can’t even begin to describe Octavia’s influence in my writing. Fresh off the Patternmaster series I realized that this was the kind of writing I could aspire to. As Caren said in one of her introductions, reading Octavia’s work left a young, impressionable writer thinking: “We can do THIS?!”